Author: TechBrunch

President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sachs, who advise him on technology and other issues. are. When it comes to AI, this team of engineers is pretty much in agreement about the need for rapid development and deployment of AI across the United States. But there is one AI safety issue that this group brings up quite a bit. That is the threat of “censorship” of AI by major corporations. technology. President Trump's Silicon Valley advisers could turn AI chatbot responses into another battleground for conservatives to fight their…

State officials say hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders could be affected by a cyberattack on the state's social services online portal, and there is a “high probability” their personal information will be compromised. . According to an update from Gov. Dan McKee's office, the attack targeted RIBridges, which Rhode Islanders use to apply for and access programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It is said to have been targeted. The attack also targeted the Healthsource RI insurance market. “Individuals who receive or apply for Medicare or Health and Human Services programs or benefits may…

Facebook's parent company Meta is supporting Elon Musk's efforts to prevent OpenAI from converting from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. The Wall Street Journal reported that Mehta sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta arguing that allowing the move would have a “seismic impact on Silicon Valley.” The company also called on Bonta to take “direct action,” saying Musk and former OpenAI board member Siobhan Gillis are “qualified and well-placed to represent the interests of Californians on this issue.” He also said. “If OpenAI's new business model is effective, nonprofit investors could earn the same commercial returns…

Facebook's parent company Meta is supporting Elon Musk's efforts to prevent OpenAI from converting from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. The Wall Street Journal reported that Mehta sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta arguing that allowing the move would have a “seismic impact on Silicon Valley.” The company also called on Bonta to take “direct action,” saying Musk and former OpenAI board member Siobhan Gillis are “qualified and well-placed to represent the interests of Californians on this issue.” He also said. “If OpenAI's new business model is effective, nonprofit investors could earn the same commercial returns…

World models (also known as world simulators) are being touted by some as the next big thing in AI. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $230 million to build “large-scale world models,” and DeepMind invests in Sora, one of the creators of OpenAI's video generator. I hired him to develop the “World Simulator.” (Sora was released on Monday. Here are some early impressions.) But what exactly are these? World models are inspired by the mental models of the world that humans naturally develop. Our brains take abstract representations from our senses and shape them into more concrete understandings of…

Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton announced Friday that his role at the company he founded in 2015 will evolve. “After 12 years of being deeply involved in day-to-day operations, I have decided to transition to the role of chairman and advisor,” she said in a statement posted online. She was previously the firm's managing partner. “This move allows me to expand Backstage’s mission to do what I do best: host office hours with founders and investors, chair our advisory board, and bring new opportunities through our platform. You will be able to concentrate on He also said the company will…

Prominent investor Marc Andreessen said he was “very scared” after meeting with government officials about the future of technology last May, calling the meeting “absolutely frightening.” Those meetings played a key role in why he supported Trump, he said on journalist Bari Weiss' podcast this week. His biggest fear was what some had said about the government's role in AI, and that his younger staff were “radicalized” and “bleeding” so that their policy ideas would confuse him and Silicon Valley. It was something he described as “damaging” profits. He walked away believing that the government supported controlling AI until it…

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that the company essentially stopped hiring a year ago, and that generative AI helped make this large-scale layoff possible. Ta. However, despite Siemiatkowski's bullishness on AI, the company is increasing the number of retiring human workers, as evidenced by public job postings targeting more humans and the company's own statements. It does not rely entirely on AI to replace people. “We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were at 4,500 people and now we're at 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have natural attrition; [does] Any technology company. Employees have been…

Let's call it the Reasoning Renaissance. Following the release of OpenAI's o1 (so-called inference model), there has been an explosion of inference models from competing AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research firm backed by quantitative traders, began previewing its first inference algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. In the same month, Alibaba's Qwen team announced what it claimed was the first “open” challenger to o1. So what opened the floodgates? Well, one of them is exploring new approaches to refining generative AI techniques. As my colleague Max Zeff recently reported, “brute force” methods of scaling up models no longer yield the…

Elon Musk's AI company, XAI, could be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that doesn't stop it from shipping new products on Friday nights. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun rolling out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. (X, which Musk also owns, often serves as a kind of testing ground for Grok.) The enhanced Grok is “three times faster” and “more accurate, follows instructions, and multi-processes.” xAI claims in a blog post. Language ability. ” Free users can only…